For some rare once-in-a-lifetime friendships, you are not disposable, and if anything were to happen to you, you would be missed. I can count those on one hand.
For most casual acquaintances (that some people incorrectly label as friends), it's certainly true.
On the family's side: only parents, siblings, children, maybe some aunt or grandparent. Second distant cousin you saw 3 times in life?
You may feel this way, but it feels a lot different when you learn that one of your acquaintances has died.
I enjoyed a brief intellectual conversation with a professor at the end of a semester. When I returned the next academic year, I stopped by his office for a quick chat, but his name was no longer on the door. The department administrator told me "Oh, he's no longer with us."
My heart sunk. I didn't know him well, he may not have remembered my name, but I wanted to thank him, and now he was gone. Cut down in his prime? He was just an acquaintance to me, he was not my friend. But I still felt that shock and grief deeply.
I asked the administrator how he'd died, and she quickly clarified: he was still alive! He had just been a guest lecturer visiting for one semester from a Scandinavian university and had now returned home. This has taught me not to delay expressing my gratitude for the acquaintances in my life.
There's a been a few similar instances in my life that have led me take up the personal practice of "Always say hi or wave to friend when the chance comes around, because there may not be a next time". It came about because I tend to see a lot of close friends and looser acquaintances on a day to day basis physically in the world, and there used to be more times than not where I wouldn't bother crossing the street or stopping for a minute to chat. Later I realized this costs me almost nothing, and even for less-close relationships, I'd prefer to have put in the tiny amount of effort to walk up and show them they're worth even that much before they overdosed or moved away or committed suicide. It's not always opportune, but what else is life for?
Granted, in retrospect, there's not really ever a sufficient amount of interaction you could have had, but if I see someone inside a cafe that I'm walking past, it's worth popping in and at least saying hi or waving from outside.
There still is value with the casual acquaintances. Just because a person is replaceable doesn't mean they are not valuable when present. My neighbor who I barely talk to has helped me out when I am in a bind. Even if a new neighbor moves in and replaces him, the original neighbor was valuable and gave me a sense of security, peace, and community while he was present.
I'd rather have my family and 1-2 close friends, and literally no one else, instead of 100 close friends that will vanish as soon as I am not able to bring anything to the table anymore, which will inevitably happen for everyone.
That’s not the point. The point is that the number is small. They are not making a judgment on the value of such relationships but rather that that number is and will always be small that in the grand scheme of things it’s insignificant, it only matters in a person’s immediate sphere.
People on this thread seriously need to stop reacting so emotionally to things. Damn. Grow up people.
The number is small in comparison to the whole humanity, yes, but this is not at all what it's about in this post. Did you read the article?
Instead, it actually is literally about each individual's immediate sphere, which, as you correctly point out, is where it matters. Having 5 true friends in a world with 100 people or in a world with 1 billion people doesn't change anything.
Even there the "problem" was left-pad being used by one or two projects used in "everything".
So the problem isn't that everyone is picking up small deps, but that _some_ people who write libs that are very popular are picking up small deps and causing this to happen.
This is different because it doesn't really say that all JS developers are looking to include left-pad. But I _do_ think that lots of library authors are too excited to make these kinds of dep trees
Another anecdote, the team couldn’t improve concurrency reliably in Python, they rewrote the service in about a month (ten years ago) in Go, everything ran about 20x faster.
Software engineers are pushed to their limits (and beyond). Unrealistic expectations are established by Twitter "I shipped an Uber clone in 2 hours with Claude" forcing every developer to crank out PRs, managers are on the look out for any kind of perceived inefficiency in tools like GetDX and Span.
If devs are expected to ship 10x faster (or else!), then they will find a way to ship 10x faster.
I always found it weird how most management would do almost anything other than ask their dev team "hey, is there any way to make you guys more productive?"
Ive had metrics rammed down my throat, Ive had AI rammed down my throat, Scrum rammed down my throad and Ive had various other diktats rammed down my throat.
95% of which slowed us down.
The only time ive been asked is when there is a deadline and it's pretty clear we arent going to hit it and even then they're interested in quick wins like "can we bring lunch to you for a few weeks?", not systemic changes.
The fastest and most productive times have been when management just set high level goals and stopped prodding.
Im convinced that the companies which seek developer autonomy will leave the ones which seek to maximize token usage in the dust in the next tech race.
In my experience what you’ve described as the ideal setting for Eng work does lead to a very high quality product. The problem then is understanding if the market you’re in values high quality over speed or familiarity. All markets claim to value quality, many markets don’t.
The way I see it, the NFT part is actually just for convenience to distribute AI generated images.
It could have been a web app, but with NFTs and Farcaster miniapps, you market to people who are willing and able to spend using their wallet instead of asking “normies” for credit card information for a 2 dollar custom image (that you could also prompt out of a free Gemini session).
With Farcaster, you also already have the profile picture of the user, one less hurdle again.
I think there's simply a huge overlap between the Crypto Bros, the NFT Bros, and now the AI Bros. The same sorts of people are pumping each one. I knew a guy who was into LeadGen and Drop Shipping in the 2000s, then got into online poker, then of course, got into Crypto, then inevitably NFTs. I haven't kept up with him, but I'm almost 100% sure he's pumping some AI related scheme now. These guys get into this pipeline and at each stage they are convinced that they're going to get rich off it.
Crypto has very narrow usage unless you're a criminal or a bro, NFT has essentially 0 non-bro activity, surely AI attracts bros, but also some of the smartest people I've known have been working on it a long time to build truly useful things.
AI can be really attractive to bros but also be incredibly useful.
In other words, AI isn't a trend that's going to pass, it's permanently going to reshape the tech scene and economy in a way that cryptocoins and NFTs absolutely did not.
> AI isn't a trend that's going to pass, it's permanently going to reshape the tech scene and economy in a way that cryptocoins and NFTs absolutely did not.
This exact wording was used for crypto. "It isn't a trend that's going to pass" and "It's going to reshape everything." Why are we sure of it now for AI (and that we're going to be right), when they were also sure of it before for crypto (and they ended up wrong)?
The AI people have the exact same feelings of absolute certainty as the crypto people had.
>The AI people have the exact same feelings of absolute certainty as the crypto people had.
Yes, this is what hype is like. Something being hyped doesn't automatically mean it's going to go bust.
Again, everyone smart was making fun of NFT at its peak. People who accomplish things are excited by LLMs, not just teenagers, grifters, bros, and your weird uncle.
Sentry MCP is great, “find out top 10 issues by users affected, check what it would take to fix and if you think it’s a low risk fix, apply it. Open a PR that links to the issues and explain the issue and the fix in three sentences max”.
For most casual acquaintances (that some people incorrectly label as friends), it's certainly true.
On the family's side: only parents, siblings, children, maybe some aunt or grandparent. Second distant cousin you saw 3 times in life?
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